A Matriarch in Melbourne and Her Band of Warped Partners in Crime

Animal Kingdom

Sullivan Stapleton, whose character deals cocaine, and Jacki Weaver, his mother, in “Animal Kingdom,” in what could be the Australian answer to “Goodfellas.”Credit
John Tsiavis/Sony Pictures Classics

With a bleached-blond mane, a glittering blue-eyed stare and a ferocious smile, Smurf Cody (Jacki Weaver) is the mama lion to a criminal brood of armed robbers and drug dealers in the mostly terrific Australian gangster film “Animal Kingdom.” The opening images of the movie, the directorial and screenwriting debut of David Michôd, are statues and drawings of lions. Although the Codys live in bland-looking suburban Melbourne, it might as well be the jungle, for all they care about law and order.

With the exception of J Cody, the 17-year-old stray cub who narrates the story several years after the fact, the family is a clan of sociopaths engaged in a deadly war with Melbourne’s out-of-control armed-robbery squad. J (James Frecheville) is thrown into the lion’s den when he goes to live with Smurf and her three sons, Darren (Luke Ford), Craig (Sullivan Stapleton) and Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), after J’s mother dies from a heroin overdose.

Numbed and expressionless in the opening scene, which shows J’s mother slumped beside him as if asleep in front of a television, J telephones his grandmother, Smurf, who hurries over to the house she hasn’t visited in years and takes him home to stay with her and her brood. Later it is revealed that Smurf and J’s mother were estranged for years after a bitter squabble over the rules of a card game.

The 60-something Smurf is a magnetic, seductive hybrid of Lady Macbeth and Ma Barker in the camouflage of a cheery suburban grandmother. She dotes on her roguish sons, on whom she bestows kisses that linger just a little too long for comfort. Her favorite son, Darren, is the most ineffectual. Only two years older than J, this sullen, baby-faced dimwit, who does his older brothers’ bidding, sits around in a daze, his brow furrowed, his fingers covering his mouth.

Craig is a heavily tattooed, hot-wired paranoid who deals cocaine and is addicted to his product. Pope, the brothers’ self-appointed leader, is a weak-chinned, crazy-eyed, drug-using bully, who baits Darren unmercifully about his possibly being gay.

The group’s anchor is their trigger-happy friend Baz Brown (Joel Edgerton), whose fatal shooting early in the movie by vengeful rogue cops while he’s sitting in a car elevates the war to a new level of chaotic tit-for-tat violence.

The intensity of the film’s nihilism is underlined by Antony Partos’s ominous semielectronic score. The relative absence of gun battles and car chases helps “Animal Kingdom” build and sustain a mood of deepening dread. It goes out of its way to deglamorize the criminal life and portray its family of crooks as warped psychopathic thugs in a losing enterprise.

Once he moves in with his relatives, J is unavoidably implicated in the family business, if only by what he overhears. His initiation takes place during a macho dust-up on the road when he is handed a gun and told to aim it at troublemakers in another vehicle; he obeys, his hand shaking, and the antagonists scatter.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

The film’s depiction of the raw fear lurking below the brothers’ braggadocio is the most pronounced emotion in a movie whose focus on the personalities of its criminals suggests an Australian answer to “Goodfellas,” minus the wise-guy humor. In one memorable scene the jittery, coked-up Craig is shown desperately fleeing the police across a field like a jackrabbit. In a drug-fueled fit of paranoia, Pope commits the most horrifying of the film’s several murders; the victim is innocent. After a double murder he heard about but didn’t see, J, pressured by the police to join a witness-protection program, finds himself in the cross hairs of Pope’s lethal paranoia.

The upright side of the law, corrupt as many of the police are shown to be, is represented by Nathan Leckie (Guy Pearce), a cold, methodical police sergeant whose extended interrogation of J sows the seeds of distrust that force J to plot his own salvation. The knotty screenplay, which proceeds in fits and starts, makes a daring and mystifying leap near the end of a story that culminates with a trial that is never shown. The crucial hunk left out of “Animal Kingdom” leaves it feeling lopsided and incomplete, if still gripping.

“Crooks always come undone, always, one way or another,” observes J in a mumbled, retrospective narration that sets up the story. Their suppressed knowledge of inevitable defeat, he implies, is what finally undoes the Codys, a family that lives in denial.

Animal KingdomOpens on Friday in Manhattan.Written and directed by David Michôd; director of photography, Adam Arkapaw; edited by Luke Doolan; music by Antony Partos; production designer, Jo Ford; costumes by Cappi Ireland; produced by Liz Watts; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes.

A version of this review appears in print on August 13, 2010, on Page C8 of the New York edition with the headline: A Matriarch in Melbourne and Her Band of Warped Partners in Crime. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe